A. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to billing systems for conferencing services and more particularly to billing systems for conferencing services that are chargeable to a client or project.
B. Introduction
Businesses today rely heavily on conferencing services to enable people to meet without having to be physically present in the same location. Audio conferencing, video conferencing, and Web conferencing are all well-known services available to businesses operating on a regional, national, or global scale. Typically, a business makes a reservation for a conference through a conferencing services provider (CSP). The CSP establishes a “virtual location,” e.g., a dial-in phone number or a Website address, for the conference participants. After the conference is over, the CSP bills the business for the cost of the conference.
A traditional CSP utilizes one or more conference facilities that provide the hardware, e.g., telephone bridges or Web servers, to support conferences. The CSP may use standard scheduling software to process customer reservations and employ a customer help line to handle any problems. If the CSP uses commissioned salespeople to sell its services, it may also use a separate sales system to track its sales and commissions data. The CSP may use an off-the-shelf or internally-developed billing system to track customer accounts and produce bills for conferences.
Many conferencing customers bill conferencing charges to their own clients or divide conferencing charges over multiple projects. For example, a law firm or consulting firm may work for several different clients and wish to divide its conferencing charges among the appropriate clients and/or matters. Because a conventional CSP typically provides a customer with a paper bill or an electronic bill in a standard format for all of its customers, the customer must input or manipulate the billing data before using the customer's own client billing software. Thus, someone in the customer's financial services department must manually process each conference bill to enable the customer to pass conferencing charges on to its clients or divide a bill among several projects. For a customer with hundreds of clients or projects, this not only takes a great deal of time but can result in human mistakes billing one client or project for another's conferences, resulting in client-relation problems.
Furthermore, conventional CSPs rely on a patchwork of systems and software that must be modified to meet the specific demands of conferencing services. For example, conferences involve a number of different people, each requiring different levels of access and information. In addition to the participants in a conference, a company's secretarial staff may be involved in scheduling the conference. The company's financial staff may be involved in processing bills, and an administrator may be designated to oversee the company's contract with the CSP. Depending on individual needs and responsibilities, each person may need access to different information. This can be very difficult to manage for a conventional conferencing services provider that relies on several separate systems.
Another difficulty faced by conventional CSPs is the calculation of salesperson commissions. Traditional commission systems base a salesperson's commission on a single measure that is easily calculated. Examples of such measures include total amount of sales or number of items sold, over a time period. Such systems are generally not designed to calculate commissions based on more economically meaningful measures such as gross margin (i.e., revenues minus cost of services sold) because of the complexity of calculating such measures. Sources of complexity include: different rates charged to different customers; different costs of services in different periods of time; and different commission rates for different services. However, conferencing services cannot be measured in simple amounts. Instead, conferencing rates vary a great deal based on, e.g., number of minutes, number of participants, time of day, etc. Furthermore, in one time period, a single customer may use several different services, making it difficult to quantify exactly what a salesperson has sold.
Systems and methods consistent with embodiments of the present invention address these and other drawbacks of conventional conferencing services provider systems.